Mail App Stuck Downloading

[scottrichardson]

Hey all,

My iMac running Monterey 12.0.1 seems to be having major issues downloading my work IMAP email. It's working fine on my laptop and phone.

Issue: Activity monitor reports that it is Downloading Messages 407 of 6,876 for example. And it won't progress past 407.

In this state, I am unable to quit the app either. Upon hitting Command+Q, the activity monitor strangely updates, as if it HAS actually been progressed past 407 emails. For example, it will jump to 3,422 of 6,876 download, however won't actually quit the app. Instead the main window closes and the activity window remains.

Additionally while in this state of stuck progress, the Mail app is prone to completely locking up, giving me the spinning beachball and not allowing me to interact with messages, composing, or deleting.

Only force quitting the app will get it to close.

Leaving the app running for multiple days to attempt to download the messages still results in a hung progress bar.

Upon relaunching the app after force quitting, it starts the download process again. However the total amount of messages to download varies, sometimes by the hundreds or thousands.

THINGS I HAVE ATTEMPTED:

1. I have completely delete my Library/Mail folder and relaunched Mail. Since the mail account is shared across devices via iCloud/Internet Accounts, I don't need to re-enter the config details for the account. It just starts downloading again from scratch to resynchronise the IMAP data, but eventually gets stuck.

My mailbox is approximately 3GB, and shouldn't take all that long to sync/download.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,

Scott

 

[beatrixwillius]

The problem is that you can't easily find out which mailbox is causing the problem. Do you have many mailboxes?

Deleting the Library/Mail folder is already the usual troubleshooting technique for Mail.

A painful troubleshooting technique would be to move all emails out of the account and then trickle them back is so that the synchronising is done in smaller parts.

You could try to trick Mail by copying the contents of the account from one hard disk to the other. Usually, Mail doesn't like to be tricked, though.

 

[scottrichardson]

The problem is that you can't easily find out which mailbox is causing the problem. Do you have many mailboxes?

Deleting the Library/Mail folder is already the usual troubleshooting technique for Mail.

A painful troubleshooting technique would be to move all emails out of the account and then trickle them back is so that the synchronising is done in smaller parts.

You could try to trick Mail by copying the contents of the account from one hard disk to the other. Usually, Mail doesn't like to be tricked, though.

Hey again. Oh I know for sure which mailbox it is. It’s my work email account. And I manage the email server.

I theoretically could jump on to the mail server and manually move emails out of the mailbox and slowly add them back in, as you suggest.

Just strange it’s fine on my MacBook Pro and iPhone.

My only other account is an iCloud personal email account and it’s fine.

 

[fivenotrump]

is there a reason that you've not updated to 12.1?

 

[Aggamemnon]

I have a problem with Mail.app on 12.1 (it was fine on 12.0). My iCloud email causes the problem on both an iMac and MBP, but gmail and work AD email is fine.

I think the problem is related to having a custom email domain, but I'm not sure.

 

[beatrixwillius]

As developer who does software to archive emails I work with Mail daily. It's the app that causes me the most work out of all the 4 major email clients my app supports. After a recent restart Mail decided to fudge up the trash settings. So yes, I believe that only one computer can make trouble.

Which mailbox of the account makes the problems? Perhaps you can delete the mailbox and then try again.

 

[BrianBaughn]

There could be a corrupt email hanging the process.

Is it IMAP or is it Exchange?

Normally, starting and stopping the syncing process should just be picking up from where it left off. First, I'd let it download until it hangs, quit or force-quit Mail, restart it and repeat to see if progress is being made.

You didn't say if you have any email apps on any other devices successfully syncing to the account…do you?

 

[scottrichardson]

There could be a corrupt email hanging the process.

Is it IMAP or is it Exchange?

Normally, starting and stopping the syncing process should just be picking up from where it left off. First, I'd let it download until it hangs, quit or force-quit Mail, restart it and repeat to see if progress is being made.

You didn't say if you have any email apps on any other devices successfully syncing to the account…do you?

Hey there. This is exactly what I was doing for a couple weeks. Wait for it to hang, force quit, then see if it had progressed. It hadn’t.

By way of an update, I managed to get all my work mail downloaded.

First I disabled iCloud mail for my personal mail. And then I removed the work IMAP account fully from internet accounts in system preferences. Then manually added the account back in.

I didn’t enable iCloud mail initially. First I opened mail and let it download all my work email (23,000 messages). That worked fine.

But then when I enabled iCloud email, and t started downloading the messages then it hung again.

So. I wonder what it could be.

I have one bit of info I forgot to share initially. It is that I often move work IMAP emails from it’s inbox into folders on my personal iCloud account due to those messages being more personal related topics. Could this be causing the issues?

 

[BrianBaughn]

I have one bit of info I forgot to share initially. It is that I often move work IMAP emails from it’s inbox into folders on my personal iCloud account due to those messages being more personal related topics. Could this be causing the issues?

I've never seen moving mail from one account to another cause an issue. Doesn't mean it couldn't happen.

What it seems like to me is something in the iCloud account is causing the Mail app hang. If it's one particular email you've got a devil of a problem to figure out. iCloud mail doesn't come with a lot of settings and options. If it were Gmail, at the webmail site you could turn off IMAP syncing for individual folders and turn them back on one folder at a time to narrow it down.

I wonder if a different email client would successfully download the iCloud mail. If that client also had something like Mail's "On My Mac" folders, you could move all the mail to those folders (making the iCloud mail account empty), re-add the account to the Mail app, and then, one-folder-at-a-time (and perhaps in subgroups), move the mail in the different email client back to the iCloud folders and observe what happens in your Mail app with the iCloud account.

 

[scottrichardson]

I've never seen moving mail from one account to another cause an issue. Doesn't mean it couldn't happen.

What it seems like to me is something in the iCloud account is causing the Mail app hang. If it's one particular email you've got a devil of a problem to figure out. iCloud mail doesn't come with a lot of settings and options. If it were Gmail, at the webmail site you could turn off IMAP syncing for individual folders and turn them back on one folder at a time to narrow it down.

I wonder if a different email client would successfully download the iCloud mail. If that client also had something like Mail's "On My Mac" folders, you could move all the mail to those folders (making the iCloud mail account empty), re-add the account to the Mail app, and then, one-folder-at-a-time (and perhaps in subgroups), move the mail in the different email client back to the iCloud folders and observe what happens in your Mail app with the iCloud account.

Well this is so simple yet so clever.

My iCloud mail works fine on my laptop. So I’ll just do exactly that there. I’ll store it all locally and then move it back folder by folder and see if I can pinpoint the culprit! Thank you so much!

 

[Artiste212]

Hey there. This is exactly what I was doing for a couple weeks. Wait for it to hang, force quit, then see if it had progressed. It hadn’t.

By way of an update, I managed to get all my work mail downloaded.

First I disabled iCloud mail for my personal mail. And then I removed the work IMAP account fully from internet accounts in system preferences. Then manually added the account back in.

I didn’t enable iCloud mail initially. First I opened mail and let it download all my work email (23,000 messages). That worked fine.

But then when I enabled iCloud email, and t started downloading the messages then it hung again.

So. I wonder what it could be.

I have one bit of info I forgot to share initially. It is that I often move work IMAP emails from it’s inbox into folders on my personal iCloud account due to those messages being more personal related topics. Could this be causing the issues?

If you move a whole bunch of emails at a time from your work email to iCloud, this could be the problem. Almost all servers have a limit on the number of outgoing mail, and some may block a large number of incoming email fom the same address. These limits are done to protect against spam, but could be working against you here.

If you're only moving 1 or 2 emails at a time, never mind.

 

[scottrichardson]

If you move a whole bunch of emails at a time from your work email to iCloud, this could be the problem. Almost all servers have a limit on the number of outgoing mail, and some may block a large number of incoming email fom the same address. These limits are done to protect against spam, but could be working against you here.

If you're only moving 1 or 2 emails at a time, never mind.

Yeah I thought about that. I do happen to run the mail server (AWS) so can configure the Dovecot mail server settings as needed. But as mentioned, it’s all fine on my laptop so it appears unique to my syncing on my iMac.

 

[Aggamemnon]

12.2 looks to have fixed it for me.

 

[scottrichardson]

12.2 looks to have fixed it for me.

Yeah good news! Mine also seems to have fixed itself. Hoping that it sticks.